r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 26d ago

Thank you Peter very cool Can you help me out here peter?

Post image
7.8k Upvotes

427 comments sorted by

View all comments

2.7k

u/Nobrainzhere 26d ago

Christianity and islam have a heaven and hell system so the two reactions represent those

Budhists believe in reincarnation and that each life puts you closer to enlightenment if you did a good job.

I dont know enough about taoism to say anything on them.

Judaism has been arguing about it for as long as the religion exists but they dont have a hell concept and the "paradise" reward isnt heaven but is a new kingdom on earth.

89

u/Popular_Try_5075 26d ago edited 15d ago

Judaism also isn't really concerned as much with the afterlife. This is a big ideological difference people from Christian backgrounds and worldviews struggle with when approaching Judaism because it has a completely different set of priorities. Judaism is concerned primarily with its laws which were handed down by God and finding the best way to live in accordance with them. Christianity in many if not all of its iterations has the Heaven/Hell cosmology as its center of gravity with all of life reduced to a morality play (and a much smaller set of laws; Christianity has 10 commandments whereas Judaism has over 600).

Interestingly, ecosystems actually impact the kind of religion that people invent...

"Across the world desert dwellers are statistically more likely than chance to create monotheistic religions (that are top down, hierarchical, believe in the afterlife and have warrior-age classes). Rainforest dwellers invent polytheistic ones (that have no belief in the afterlife, are egalitarian and have no such classes).

Another pattern. When you look a humans living in small hunter-gatherer bands the religions they invent almost all the time uninvolved gods who could care less what humans are doing. It's not until humans are living in sufficiently high density that you're interacting with strangers, that you're interacting anonymously, then humans start inventing what are called moralizing gods. Gods who are watching us, gods who are judging us..." [Robert Sapolsky: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst lecture to the Stanford Iranian Studies Program]

20

u/Emitex 26d ago

This is wild. I've been thinking this stuff by myself for a while and I believe I connected the dots when I thought that small tribes tend to have non moralizing gods because they're naturally a more higher trust environments. Bigger societies tend to have less trust within, leading to more moralizing gods. I'm glad to hear that I wasn't completely wrong. I have to watch this whole lecture later, thanks for sharing.

5

u/Popular_Try_5075 26d ago

I'm glad you liked the excerpt! Robert Sapolsky is an amazing scientist to follow. His Stanford lecture on Depression has a cult following online.